Editorial: Entrepreneurs rising
Mark Tepper got it right when he told WPI students at a December 6 campus forum that thinking like an entrepreneur helps those who work for large companies as well as small ones. Tepper, senior vice president of drug development for CytRx Corp., has been on both sides of the spectrum several times, working for big companies and founding two small ones – the first of which shut down, and the second, Araios Inc. was acquired by CytRx Corp.
Tepper learned to identify market opportunities and risks - an important lesson, for those who want to make a lot of money, save the world, or both – as some "social entrepreneurs" are doing now. Entrepreneurship is not about opening another ice cream stand says Seven Hills Foundation CEO and Clark University Entrepreneur in Residence David Jordan; it’s about addressing old problems in new ways. More social entrepreneurs are using real world business concepts to bring about social change – and it’s about time.
James Bildner, another Clark Entrepreneur in Residence, chairs Literary Ventures, an endeavor that invests in works of literature deemed to be of value, It returns profits to the fund to invest in other literary works, rather than investing in an author, an individual press or a bookstore. One of its choices, Monique and The Mango Rains, ranked in The Boston Globe magazine’s 10 best reads of 2006. Bildner is also a general partner of New Horizons Partners LLC, a venture philanthropy firm specializing in early-stage companies that advance critical public policy issues in literature, health care, education, the environment and the arts.
Social entrepreneurship has its antecedents in the social movement in the 1960s. But social freedom of the time did not translate into career freedom, says Clark EIR Douglas Mellinger, head of Foundation Source. A zeitgeist book of the times, Charles Reich’s 1970 The Greening of America, called for a new mindset, "Consciousness III" to challenge the then-current state of things – social and gender inequality, the war economy, environmental problems, and corporate supremacy.
Reich credited the new thinking to college students, encouraging them to challenge a macroeconomic world in which most of them didn’t yet have a meaningful part. Upon graduation, many of the kids whose new counterculture Reich romanticized would find that green consciousness alone couldn’t make jobs grow on trees, particularly in the distressed economy of the 1970s. While many in the prevailing counterculture could point out the flaws in the old system, they hadn’t yet learned the life skills to create something new.
A generation later, Reich’s incomplete vision has inspired others, many unsung, who have done the work to bring about change. Improved technology, combined with the willingness to try, fail, and try again, have brought about many of the material and social changes we weren’t capable of delivering a generation ago. The number of programs focusing on entrepreneurship in our region’s educational institutions is a long overdue trend, and a healthy sign for our economy. Long live the entrepreneur.
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments